Facebook's lead HR consultant says every great manager follows these 2 principles

When the management guide "First,
Break All the Rules" was first published in 1999, managers
embraced it and HR departments rejected it.

Two of the book's core messages — that a company's success relies
on individual managers' leadership styles and that employees'
weaknesses should be ignored rather than "fixed" — were the
opposite of what the world's biggest corporations believed at the
time, the book's coauthor Marcus Buckingham told Business
Insider.

Buckingham and his coauthor Curt Coffman were Gallup analysts at
the time, and they pored over 25 years of Gallup studies of
80,000 managers across 400 companies to determine how the world's
best managers led their teams.

Buckingham said their findings took time to manifest, but were
perhaps best implemented for the first time at Facebook in 2008.
Its new HR boss Lori Goler used the findings as the foundation
for the tech company's people operations. Goler brought in
Buckingham as a consultant through his consulting firm, The Marcus Buckingham Company, and he
has worked closely with Facebook's leadership team ever since.

These are the fundamental principles Buckingham thinks the best
managers follow:

1. It is an individual manager's responsibility to develop their
team's culture

Facebook's VP of People
Lori Goler.Facebook

It's a myth that companies have a single corporate culture,
Buckingham said. Instead, they have several team cultures
established by individual managers.

Using Facebook as an example, Buckingham said that employees'
experiences of what it's like to work at the company will be
largely dependent on who they have as a manager — and the
company's leadership knows this.

According to Buckingham, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg "goes to
bed at night with one preoccupation, which is: 'Are our team
leaders good enough? Because if they're not, I don't care what
plans I have, they go awry. I lose people. I lose products.'"

Facebook leaders decided to survey their employees and determine
which manager qualities employees thrived under.
The best traits of managers turned out to be: They care about
their team members, they provide opportunities for growth, they
set clear expectations and goals, they give frequent and
actionable feedback, they provide helpful resources, they hold
their teams accountable for success, and they recognize
outstanding work.

"Everything is the local team leader" at Facebook, Buckingham
said. "And that's rare. Many companies think you can do
everything from the center."

2. Employees' strengths should be fostered, and weaknesses
largely ignored

Goler embraces the management philosophy of "one size fits one."

"If you were to sum up what the best team leaders do on their
teams, they individualize," Buckingham said. "They're brilliant
at figuring out what each person's got that can be usefully
deployed to have the team win, and the best team leaders are
really, really good at that. They play chess with their people.
They see a knight, a bishop, a rook, a queen, etc., and they
capitalize on individual differences."

HR departments initially pushed back against Buckingham and
Coffman's findings in 1999 because the common practice was to
determine a list of talents each employee should have (rather
than best practices to follow) and then measure their success on
how much progress they made on strengthening their weaknesses.
Buckingham believes this resulted in promoting people to their
level of incompetency.

"It's a really counterintuitive idea that your best return on
investment as a team leader is to help people to grow their
already greatest strengths," Buckingham said.

But if you ask Facebook's managers, they'll tell you it's the
best way to lead.